In his fifteenth book, The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Professor James L. Kugel offers a theory to explain why ancient and modern peoples experience God in such profoundly different ways. He delivers a scholarly tour de force that is also accessible to the general reader.

Kugel argues that Abraham, Joseph, Moses, the Hebrew prophets, and other ancient people possessed a “semipermeable mind” that was receptive to seeing, hearing, and meeting the Divine Presence. He asserts that such contacts, which allowed for direct, personal contact with God, take place within the “fog of self,” a dream-like quality most modern people lack.

The Israelites of Scripture, he says, felt they were part of a collective entity open to experiencing the divine; in contrast, moderns tend to be a collection of spiritually closed individuals, ill-equipped to encounter God. Kugel laments that our biblical ancestors’ openness to-meet God attribute has shifted into “…oddly stunted and closed-off organs, which today are scarcely aware of their tiny opening to the Outside [God].”